We all care what people think of us. We all spend time construing what other people’s perception of us might be, wondering whether we are enough. Enough to be regarded as somebody worth knowing or lacking? Lacking; charisma, sparkle, presence, conviction. It has been a thorn in my thoughts over the past couple of months, picking away at me until I’m questioning my own perception of myself. Am I really that awkward at small talk? That inept at showing the real me to people I don’t know very well? That forgettable? So, unassuming? Really…do I really need to do everything to accommodate everyone else….to fit into how I think they think I should be?

My mind has nursed this idea, noted it, observed it and weighed up the truth of it. People don’t challenge confidence, they accept it. If you get embarrassed by who you are, what you stand for or the things you believe in then others will fuel that embarrassment. But if you proudly and unabashedly tell and show people what your all about they will accept it because there is no reason for them not to, it is obvious you believe in it and are not going to be shaken from that so they have nothing to gain from challenging you. There is no weakness or doubt for them to unpick.

Humiliation takes two people for it to exist, the person doing the humiliation and for the person receiving it to accept that they have been humiliated. As soon as the person receiving decides that they are not being humiliated, it ceases to exist, that power over them dissolves. That is it in the extreme, most of the time we do not have humiliation inflicted on us but the concept remains the same for the small things that shape who we are. If we give people the power over us, then we live within the constraints of what a million different people expect and accept of us. And so, I worry that I look like death warmed up without make up on, that my eyes have such thin skin around them that underneath looks like 2 purple bruises. I worry that I’m about to say something and it might well be ignored by those I’m speaking to. I fleetingly worry that my figure doesn’t quite measure up. I worry that my terrible driving is making those behind me (who I will never know) one minute later. I worry that my new colleagues at work think I’m a dull addition to the office, yet to prove myself as a worthwhile first choice. I worry that believing in God makes people assume things about me. And so on. It doesn’t even matter what the content of these concerns or worries are the fact is they are connected to people beyond me and what they think. People who I have no control over so why consume so much of myself over what they think of me? So much concern over the external rather than focusing on the internal, that source of living which is within me.

Understanding this is becoming a beautiful revelation, a personal epiphany. I can’t really explain what it means or fully articulate how I think about it but in my mind some of the fog about what life is all about is beginning to thin. If I don’t care what people think of me, nor compare myself to them nor measure my worth in their eyes then there is a freedom to grasp. I’m at the beginning of understanding this and tentatively walking to the centre of this idea, now, to move beyond just understanding it but taking hold of it and living with my own parameters and measuring my worth by my own criteria.

Thursday, 27 June 2013

Sometimes life has acute timing and you can feel yourself sitting on the edge of a cusp with your feet dangling over and your about to fall in because this great big change is not only coming but it is here and it is whispering and clamouring at your name.

I'm looking back and looking forward and can see a line being drawn from one into the other. What lies ahead would not be here without what lies behind and so the two lean on each other in my mind and I trust them both and the truth of the line that binds them.

The line is the core of me. It is drawn through time, straight through all I have experienced and all I will experience. The constant currency of me forcing itself through it all. A constant that continues to be, whilst the ins and outs of life and the ups and downs of this world happen and continue to exist around it.

There is a stillness and a knowing that I have settled into myself, I am who I am and I understand that now in a way I never did before.

Best of all I accept it. I accept that I worry, that I expect too much, that I want to control all around me and that I can't. I accept I'm not everyone's cup of tea, that with wrong people I'm awkward and stumble through conversation, inarticulate and bumbling. On the same hand, I accept that with the right people my mind opens up and I want to pour all I think and perceive into them and share the wonder and joy of this world with them. I accept I like to make drama and much of small occurrences and incidents and turn them into more than they should be. I accept this world and my place in it, it is where i am supposed to be and I love this place for all the beauty and meaning it holds and accept that it is only there if you look for it.

Accepting all I am, good and bad, the shades and spectrum of me. I am the sum of all my previous experiences, the sum of everyone I have ever interacted with, they have helped make me. Finally I understand, I am a unique combination of my mum and dad and all those who have gone before them.

A sense of my small but perfectly shaped place in all this chaos and calm of life. I am ready for what now begins, 2 years ago I wouldn't have been so life has timing it knows when to move you on and when to make you stay. It only gives you what you can deal with, nothing more and nothing less.

My sense of myself is now within me and with it a confidence to take me forward to the next point and moment of my journey .I thank God and my lucky stars for bringing me to the people I needed to shape and make me ready for now. Life has impeccable timing.

Sunday, 14 April 2013

The warmth of a cup of tea in my hands, muted light and
stillness. Sleep used to win every time but as I get older the allure of that
first sentence shakes me from my bed. It is early Sunday morning and there is a
restfulness, that time before the world wakes up and there is only the rising
steam from my tea and the second hand moving around the clock. A time for the
inner sanctum of me, to be there at the forefront, the wide eyes of it turned
inwards to dissect the introspection.

I’m thinking, isn’t it something that there are so many ways
to fill an hour, so many different ways and that no one hour is ever completely
the same. The luxury of a Sunday is to choose how to spend each hour of today,
each hour stretched out to be filled and having the freedom to shape my day.
There is humanness to that thought. The architect of our own days.

There is a lot of wasted life, wasted seconds and hours-time
is a gift that we all squander and yet, there is so much I want to do and know.
I know it will never all get done but without the pressure of time would there
be any urge to do any of it?

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Down tunneled streets, stretching dark matching never-ending thoughts, full stops of light. When I walk at night I feel the weather, I feel the press of it around me acutely, the wind whirling, sending my thoughts out into the swallowing blackness. There is mindfulness and mindlessness- an appreciation of what the world around me is and an easing of the wash of thoughts and feelings that have been tumbling into each other. My dog pulling me along, following the white of her tail and the pitter patter of her paws, a sense of just walking, going forwards- anywhere, into the night. There is nowhere in particular to go, walking for walking sake, for the simple joy of being able to move and be in the world.

The smell of woodsmoke bearing down a heavy scent into my nose, fibres of woody-earthiness, breathing through me and into my imagination of cosy rooms, pulled up cushions and flickering, soft, fire. Glancing into passing cubes of light; shining frames holding picture upon picture of homes. My eyes pass over, again and again, one lounge after another and with each sweep of vision, there's a small recognition and mental comfort in being a passing observer of the lives lived in a home. The glow of human comfort and contentment seeping into the blackness of the night outside.

Wednesday, 6 February 2013

By this age is your life set on a certain course, is it ever set on a certain course and can we change its direction when we want? But sketched across my horizon are ifs and buts of why this can be and why that cannot be and I want to erase them so that anything is possible.

Some days I do think everything is possible and others I think nothing is and I wonder how can that be, how can the same person believe in everything whilst simultaneously believing in nothing.

I'm starting to believe that all the job applications I ever send are sent to the same mocking person who sees I've tried again and laughs at my poor attempts to portray who I am and what I am capable of via a piece of paper, where my life and all my past achievements and experiences have to be placed within carefully construed boxes that allow no expression of you are. It is an impasse and a burdening need to know which way now and finding its never going to be in the direction you thought.

I'm feeling that life is passing me by but is it really? If I can find enough in each day and discover some new thought and perspective that finds me sitting right in the belly of living, noticing I'm alive and the moments that make me feel that way then life is always present and not a passive thing. Present living, not passive living where the days hurl by you and you can't tell one from the other, I want each day to have something significant in it for me that marks it out as a unique as that specific day, a character unto itself .

There will never be another Wednesday 6th February 2013-never, I will never have as long left of this life as I have right now this second- never so all of it has to count for something. I need to use my seconds like water to a dying man, utterly valuable and entirely necessary.

Sunday, 13 January 2013

I sit at a desk and see the sky speared across my line of
vision and tree branches feeling their way at the bottom of the sky and in this
one absorbed moment there is enough to carry within me, enough for the innards
of my soul to take and turn into contentment. Sometimes, I believe we can have
more of a say over time or at least our perception of time than we think. If I
try hard enough I can slow time down around me by noticing everything contained
within each moment of time. A moment can be unfolded corner by corner, scene
by scene, explored and excavated until all the goodness in it transcends a
point in time into your memory.

By stopping the constant rushing and feeling that everything
must be done, I begin to notice the colours and the sounds, the beauty of it
all that blurs by you when you hurtle yourself through the day without pausing for breath. I’m noticing days
are made up of millions of moments that we can chose to notice or choose to
overlook. We can choose to miss the point of this intricate, delicate muchness that life offers to us day in,
day out.

Everything within this world is beyond comprehension except
the earth moving, stomach tumbling realisation that you are living right now,
in this moment you are here and there is nothing more to it than that.

Fully grab hold of that notion and sing it through your
cells until it races through your blood, feel life in you and then there are no
more questions of life to be asked.

I’ve come from a point back there in the past, a miserable,
self-absorbed, self-inflicted point I’ve come from it and moved away from it.
Now I’m here, I’m in this moment of you reading this very word…and it is this
shift in perspective. A holding and
treasuring of ‘now’, in my heart, that changes the world
into a shifting kaleidoscope of colours instead of a grey dreariness. Yesterday
is gone and tomorrow will arrive but the present is racing through you and so
what shall you do with it? Notice it,
take it, build upon it so that your yesterdays are
accomplishments and the future an unfolding of the hope that glittered through
you now.